from The New York Times: Steven Gilliatt, president of G2 Worldwide, a leading brand development and design consulting company in New York, recently had an up-close-and-personal demonstration of the increasing power of eye appeal in retailing.
“I was buying an iPod a couple weeks ago and there was a feeding frenzy at the store,” Mr. Gilliatt said, referring to the Apple Store in SoHo, where customers jostled one another to buy the special edition iPod loaded with music by the rock group U2. “I was there as a civilian, but I’d been converted from consideration to purchase,” he said, borrowing jargon from marketing mavens.
Mr. Gilliatt’s response to the innovative design of the Apple Store
In “The Future of Competition” by C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy, the authors discuss how the future of competition is in creating and co-creating experiences with your customers. Their claim is that the design of experience environments (the Apple store, for example) with the appropriate amount of dialog, access, risk elimination and transparency will create those deeper bonds with customers. This will create communities that will desire to work with your company again and again. Personal involvement is a hook. This concept ranges from the more obvious examples, such as Starbucks Coffee shops, to the less obvious, such as a houseboat manufacturer that allows their customers to see their houseboat being built online.